Jeffrey1 Amherst and Smallpox Blankets
Lord Jeffrey1 Amherst's letters discussing germ warfare against American Indians
Lord Jeff
Lord Jeffrey
1
Amherst was commanding general of British forces in North America
during the final battles of the so-called French & Indian war
(1754-1763). He won victories against the French to acquire Canada for
England and helped make England the world's chief colonizer at the
conclusion of the Seven Years War among the colonial powers (1756-1763).
The town of
Amherst, Massachusetts, was named for Lord Jeff even before he became a Lord.
Amherst Collegewas later named after the town. It is said the local inhabitants who formed the town preferred another name,
Norwottuck,
after the Indians whose land it had been; the colonial governor
substituted his choice for theirs. Frank Prentice Rand, in his book,
The Village of Amherst: A Landmark of Light
[Amherst, MA: Amherst Historical Society, 1958], says that at the time
of the naming, Amherst was "the most glamorous military hero in the New
World. ... ...the name was so obvious in 1759 as to be almost
inevitable." [p. 15]
Amherst College china plates depicting mounted Englishman with sword chasing Indians on foot were in use until the 1970's.
Click on the pictures to see full-size images in new windows.
The history of the naming of the town of
Amherst, New York, shows a similar idolizing of the general:
On April 10, 1818, the Town of Amherst was officially created by an Act
of the Senate of the State of New York. This new town was named for Sir
Jeffrey Amherst, an English lord who was Commander-in-Chief of the
British troops in America in 1758-1763, before the American Revolution.
King George III rewarded Lord Amherst by giving him 20,000 acres in New
York, but Lord Amherst never visited his new lands. [From: A Brief History of the Town of Amherst, (Amherst Museum, 1997)
Smallpox blankets
Despite his fame, Jeffrey Amherst's name became tarnished by stories
of smallpox-infected blankets used as germ warfare against American
Indians. These stories are reported, for example, in Carl Waldman's
Atlas of the North American Indian
[NY: Facts on File, 1985]. Waldman writes, in reference to a siege of
Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) by Chief Pontiac's forces during the summer of
1763:
... Captain Simeon Ecuyer had bought time by sending
smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding
the fort -- an early example of biological warfare -- which started an
epidemic among them. Amherst himself had encouraged this tactic in a
letter to Ecuyer. [p. 108]
Some people have doubted these stories; other people, believing the
stories, nevertheless assert that the infected blankets were not
intentionally distributed to the Indians, or that Lord Jeff himself is
not to blame for the germ warfare tactic.
Drawing
by Terry R. Peters, Medical Illustrator, Topeka (Kansas) Veterans
Administration Medical Center. Used with permission. Click on image to
view full size in new window.
Lord Jeff's letters during Pontiac's Rebellion
The documents provided here are made available to set the record
straight. These are images of microfilmed original letters written
between General Amherst and his officers and others in his command
during the summer of 1763, when the British were fighting what became
known as
Pontiac's Rebellion.
Pontiac, an Ottawa chief who had sided with the French, led an
uprising against the British after the French surrender in Canada.
Indians were angered by Amherst's refusal to continue the French
practice of providing supplies in exchange for Indian friendship and
assistance, and by a generally imperious British attitude toward Indians
and Indian land. As Waldman puts it:
... Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander-in-chief for
America, believed ... that the best way to control Indians was through a
system of strict regulations and punishment when necessary, not
"bribery," as he called the granting of provisions. [p. 106]
The British Manuscript Project
The documents provided here are among Amherst's letters and other
papers microfilmed as part of the British Manuscript Project, 1941-1945,
undertaken by the
United States Library of Congress
during World War II. The project was designed to preserve British
historical documents from possible war damage. There are almost three
hundred reels of microfilm on Amherst alone.
The microfilm is difficult to read, and paper copies even harder.
Nonetheless, the images obtained by scanning the copies are sufficiently
clear for online viewing. The images are of key excerpts from the
letters. An index is provided to show by microfilm document number the
location of the imaged documents in the microfilm set. Text files of the
excerpts are also provided.
The documents
These are the pivotal letters:
These letters also discuss the use of dogs to hunt the Indians, the
so-called "Spaniard's Method," which Amherst approves in principle, but
says he cannot implement because there are not enough dogs.
In a letter dated
26 July 1763, Bouquet acknowledges Amherst's approval [125k] and writes, "all your Directions will be observed."
Historian Francis Parkman, in his book
The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada
[Boston: Little, Brown, 1886] refers to a postscript in an earlier
letter from Amherst to Bouquet wondering whether smallpox could not be
spread among the Indians:
Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox
among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use
every stratagem in our power to reduce them. [Vol. II, p. 39 (6th
edition)]
I have not found this letter, but there is a letter from
Bouquet to Amherst, dated 23 June 1763,
[189k] three weeks before the discussion of blankets to the Indians,
stating that Captain Ecuyer at Fort Pitt (to which Bouquet would be
heading with reinforcements) has reported smallpox in the Fort. This
indicates at least that the writers knew the plan could be carried out.
It is curious that the specific plans to spread smallpox were
relegated to postscripts. I leave it to the reader to ponder the
significance of this.
Several other letters from the summer of 1763 show the smallpox idea was
not an anomaly. The letters are filled with comments that indicate a
genocidal intent, with phrases such as:
Amherst's correspondence during this time includes many letters on
routine matters, such as officers who are sick or want to be relieved of
duty; accounts of provisions on hand, costs for supplies, number of
people garrisoned; negotiations with provincial governors (the army is
upset with the Pennsylvania assembly, for example, for refusing to draft
men for service); and so on. None of these other letters show a
deranged mind or an obsession with cruelty. Amherst's venom was strictly
reserved for Indians.
The French and the Indians
The sharpest contrast with letters about Indians is provided by
letters regarding the other enemy, the French. Amherst has been at war
with the French as much as with the Indians; but he showed no obsessive
desire to extirpate them from the earth. They were apparently his
"worthy" enemy. It was the Indians who drove him mad. It was they
against whom he was looking for "an occasion, to extirpate them root and
branch." [J. C. Long,
Lord Jeffrey Amherst: A Soldier of the King (NY: Macmillan, 1933), p. 187]
Long describes Amherst's "kindliness to the French" and refers to Amherst's "intensity of feeling on these issues":
Amherst's kindliness to the French civilians was more than a
military gesture. He had a warm sympathy for the countryside, an
interest in people and the way they lived. "The Inhabitants live
comfortably," he observed in his journal, "most have stone houses....
....
This humane attitude was reflected in his rules for the
governing of Canada. As its de facto military Governor-General he
established a temporary code ... a program of tolerance and regard for
colonial sensibilities....
***
Perhaps most statesmanlike of all was Amherst's recognition
of the French law, ... a recognition which permitted change of national
loyalty without social upheaval. [p. 137]
Drawing
by R. Smirke, engraved by P. Audinet & published by J. Stratford
112 Holborn Hill, May 18, 1811, entitled "The Humanity of General
Amherst." Courtesy of William Plowden, London, England, who writes:
"The image appears to refer to the end of a siege or battle in which
some Caucasians have surrendered to General Amherst who is, presumably,
treating them more humanely than may have been expected." Note the
curious figure, right background, who appears to be West Indian. Click
on image to view full engraving in new window.
In contrast to these kindly feelings, Long says that Pontiac's
attacks on British forts at Detroit and Presqu'Isle "aroused Amherst to a
frenzy, a frenzy almost hysterical in its impotence." Long then quotes
from Amherst's letter to Sir William Johnson:
... it would be happy for the Provinces there was not an
Indian settlement within a thousand Miles of them, and when they are
properly punished, I care not how soon they move their Habitations, for
the Inhabitants of the Woods are the fittest Companions for them, they
being more nearly allied to the Brute than to the Human Creation.
[p.186]
Colonel Bouquet's poetic line,
"... every Tree is become an Indian,"
[63k] quoted above, was his description of a contagion of fear among
"the terrified Inhabitants," for whom the Indians were a part of the
wildness they perceived around themselves. Indian warriors would not
stand in ordered ranks; they fell back into the forests only to emerge
again in renewed attack; their leaders defied British logic and proved
effective against a string of British forts; these were the enemy that
nearly succeeded in driving the British out, and became the target for
British genocide.
2
Conclusion
All in all, the letters provided here remove all doubt about the
validity of the stories about Lord Jeff and germ warfare. The General's
own letters sustain the stories.
As to whether the plans actually were carried out, Parkman has this to say:
... in the following spring, Gershom Hicks, who had been
among the Indians, reported at Fort Pitt that the small-pox had been
raging for some time among them....
An additional source of information on the matter is the
Journal of William Trent,
commander of the local militia of the townspeople of Pittsburgh during
Pontiac's seige of the fort. This Journal has been described as "... the
most detailed contemporary account of the anxious days and nights in
the beleaguered stronghold." [
Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsylvania, John W. Harpster, ed. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938).]
Trent's entry for May 24, 1763, includes the following statement:
... we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.
Trent's Journal confirms that smallpox had broken out in Fort Pitt prior
to the correspondence between Bouquet and Amherst, thus making their
plans feasible. It also indicates that intentional infection of the
Indians with smallpox had been already approved by at least Captain
Ecuyer at the fort, who some commentators have suggested was in direct
correspondence with General Amherst on this tactic (though I have not
yet found such letters).
Notes
1. There is some dispute about the
spelling of Amherst's first name. As Lion G. Miles points out, 'Amherst
always signed as "Jeff:" so there has been a long-standing controversy
as to the correct spelling of his first name. I am reasonably certain
that it should be "Jeffery." Those officers closest to him, his aides
etc., always spelled the name that way and transcribed his orders as
from "Jeffery." Official letters addressed to him from England and the
British Army List have it as "Sir Jeffery Amherst" (never mind that
Bouquet solved the problem by addressing him as "Jeffry"). Even the
biography by Long … has the title of "Lord Jeffery Amherst," not
"Jeffrey."' [Lion G. Miles, member of the board, Native American
Institute at Hudson, NY, in a personal email communication, 15 November
1998]
2. The depiction of Indians as wild
beasts was quite common among early American leaders, including George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson. David E. Stannard writes: 'As is so
often the case, it was New England's religious elite who made the point
more graphically than anyone. Referring to some Indians who had given
offense to the colonists, the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote: "Once you
have but got the Track of those Ravenous howling Wolves, then pursue
them vigourously; Turn not back till they are consumed… Beat them small
as the Dust before the Wind." Lest this be regarded as mere rhetoric,
empty of literal intent, consider that another of New England's most
esteemed religious leaders, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, as late as
1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists
be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of
dogs "to hunt Indians as they do bears."' [
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press (1992)), p. 241]
Additional Sources of Information
1. Medical information
A mild form of smallpox virus,
Variola minor (also called
alastrim), is transmitted by inhalation and is communicable for 3-7 days. The more serious smallpox virus,
Variola major,
is transmitted both by inhalation and by contamination; it is
communicable by inhalation for 9-14 days and by contamination for
several years in a dried state. For further medical information, see
Donald A. Henderson, et al., "Smallpox as a Biological Weapon: Medical and Public Health Management," Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 281 No. 22 (June 9, 1999).
Ann F. Ramenofsky,
Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), also discusses the question of communicability:
Among Class I agents, Variola major holds a unique position.
Although the virus is most frequently transmitted through droplet
infection, it can survive for a number of years outside human hosts in a
dried state (Downie 1967; Upham 1986). As a consequence, Variola major
can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or
blankets (Dixon 1962). In the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army sent
contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to
control the Indian problem (Stearn and Stearn 1945). [p. 148]
Abraham B. Bergman, et al., "A Political History of the Indian Health
Service," comments on the birth of the Indian Health Service:
Federal health services for Indians began under War Department auspices
in the early 1800's. At that time the Federal Indian policy was
primarily one of military containment. As early as 1802 Army physicians
took emergency measures to curb contagious diseases among Indian tribes
in the vicinity of military posts. The first large scale smallpox
vaccination of Indians was authorized by Congress in 1832, probably
launched more to protect US soldiers than to benefit Indians.
[unpaginated draft, quoted with permission from the author and the Seattle Indian Health Board; publication data: Bergman, Abraham B., et al. "A Political History of the Indian Health Service." The Milbank Quarterly 77, no. 4 (1999):571-604]
2. Social and Political Effects of Disease
E. Wagner Stearn & Allen E. Stearn,
The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian (Boston: Bruce Humphries (1945)), point out the social-political effects of smallpox:
Smallpox, which was introduced into the mainland of the Americas in the
early part of the sixteenth century, not only decimated the native
population for four centuries, but so demoralized the tribes through the
terror it spread among them that it has been considered by many
authorities to have been an important factor in their comparatively easy
subjugation by the whites. Before the advent of the white man tribal
warfare and, at times, famine made the chief inroads on the native
population, but during the period of exploration and settlement the
diseases of the white man, new to the native, caused terrific havoc. It
is claimed that Haiti (Espanola) alone lost two-thirds of its population
in the three years of Columbus's conquest, during the years 1492-1495.
The two to three hundred inhabitants had quickly fallen prey not only to
ruthless conquest but to a variety of infectious diseases. [p. 13]
Harold Napoleon,
Yuuyaraq: the Way of the Human Being, with
commentary, edited by Eric Madsen (Fairbanks, Alaska: University of
Alaska, College of Rural Alaska, Center for Cross-Cultural Studies
(1991)), states that epidemics caused a form of post-traumatic stress
disorder and social collapse:
Compared to the span of life of a culture, the Great Death was
instantaneous. The Yup'ik world was turned upside down, literally
overnight. Out of the suffering, confusion, desperation, heartbreak, and
trauma was born a new generation of Yup'ik people. They were born into
shock. They woke to a world in shambles, many of their people and their
beliefs strewn around them, dead. In their minds they had been overcome
by evil. Their medicines and their medicine men and women had proven
useless. Everything they had believed in had failed. Their ancient world
had collapsed.
From their innocence and from their inability to understand and dispel
the disease, guilt was born into them. They had witnessed mass
death—evil—in unimaginable and unacceptable terms. These were the men
and women orphaned by the sudden and traumatic death of the culture that
had given them birth. They would become the first generation of
modern-day Yup'ik. [p. 11]
…
The survivors taught almost nothing about the old culture to their
children. It was as if they were ashamed of it, and this shame they
passed on to their children by their silence and by allowing cultural
atrocities to be committed against their children. The survivors also
gave up all governing power of the villages to the missionaries and
school teachers, whoever was most aggressive. There was no one to
contest them. In some villages the priest had displaced the angalkuq. In some villages there was theocracy under the benevolent dictatorship of a missionary. The old guardians of Yuuyaraq on the other hand, the angalkuq,
if they were still alive, had fallen into disgrace. They had become a
source of shame to the village, not only because their medicine and Yuuyaraq
had failed, but also because the missionaries now openly accused them
of being agents of the devil himself and of having led their people into
disaster. [pp. 13-14]
3. Other writers on Amherst and smallpox
A.1. Elizabeth A. Fenn, "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffrey Amherst,"
Journal of American History vol. 86, no. 4 (March, 2000), pp. 1552-1580:
Our preoccupation with Amherst has kept us from recognizing that
accusations of what we now call biological warfare—the military use of
smallpox in particular—arose frequently in eighteenth-century America.
Native Americans, moreover, were not the only accusers. By the second
half of the century, many of the combatants in America's wars of empire
had the knowledge and technology to attempt biological warfare with the
smallpox virus. Many also adhered to a code of ethics that did not
constrain them from doing so. Seen in this light, the Amherst affair
becomes not so much an aberration as part of a larger continuum in which
accusations and discussions of biological warfare were common, and
actual incidents may have occurred more frequently than scholars have
previously acknowledged. [p. 1553]
A.2. Elizabeth A. Fenn expands on this theme in her book,
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
(NY: Hill and Wang, 2001), discussing widespread accusations and
examples of biological warfare on the American continent during this
period.
Selected excerpts from the book are presented on a separate page.
B. Helen Jaskoski, "'A Terrible Sickness Among Them': Smallpox Stories of the Frontier," in Helen Jaskoski, ed.,
Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136-157:
Three nineteenth-century historians who wrote about the colonial Great
Lakes area recorded accounts of smallpox epidemics and their origins.
The most widely known smallpox story comes from Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac
(1870). Ottawa political leader Andrew J. Blackbird relates a similar
story from the same period of the French and Indian War in his History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan
(1887). William Whipple Warren, a Minnesota Ojibwa historian and
legislator, offers two very different accounts of an epidemic that took
place in Minnesota in the 1780s in his History of the Ojibway People
(1885). Comparison of these historians' smallpox stories enlarges our
understanding of the history and epidemiology of the disease in the
particular period. The smallpox stories also offer insight into
alternative conceptualizations of the experience that historians a
century later envisioned as the "frontier." One other Ojibwa historian,
George Copway, who does not tell a smallpox story, offers in his Indian Life and Indian History
(1860) such a paradigm for understanding events of the time - including
smallpox epidemics - as they were experienced by the native
communities. [pp. 137-138]
An excerpt from Blackbird's History, with Jaskoski's introduction and commentary, are presented on a separate page.
C. Adrienne Mayor, "The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend,"
Journal of American Folklore 108(427):54-77 (1995):
One name is repeatedly linked to the story of the smallpox blanket:
Jeffrey Amherst. In 1851, Francis Parkman was the first historian to
document Lord Amherst's "shameful plan" to exterminate Indians by giving
them smallpox-infected blankets taken from the corpses of British
soldiers at Fort Pitt in 1763 (Parkman 1991:646-651). The feasibility of
the documented plan, whether or not it was successfully carried out,
has given credibility and moral impact to the fears expressed in all
poison-garment tales. The Amherst incident itself has taken on legendary
overtones as believers and nonbelievers continue to argue over the
facts and their interpretation. [p. 57]
D. Robert L. O'Connell,
Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989):
Marking a milestone of sorts, certain colonists during the French and
Indian Wars resorted to trading smallpox-contaminated blankets to local
tribes with immediate and devastating results. While infected carcasses
had long been catapulted into besieged cities, this seems to be the
first time a known weakness in the immunity structure of an adversary
population was deliberately exploited with a weapons response. [p. 171]
E. R. G. Robertson,
Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2001):
With the surrender of New France to Great Britain, command of the
English North American military forces fell to Lord Jeffrey Amherst. An
arrogant aristocrat who despised all Indians, Amherst withheld gunpowder
and lead from France's former native allies, stating that England's
enemies ought to be punished, not rewarded. When informed that the
tribes depended on their muskets for taking game and would starve
without ammunition, he remained unswayed, callously informing his aides
that they should seed the complaining bands with smallpox so as to lend
starvation a speedy hand. [p. 119; with footnote to Herman J. Viola, After Columbus (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1990), 98]
…
In the spring of 1763, during the Indian uprising led by Ottawa Chief
Pontiac, a party of Delawares ringed British owned Fort Pitt (now
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), calling for its surrender. Captain Simeon
Ecuyer, a Swiss mercenary and the fort's senior officer, saved the
garrison by giving the Delawares a gift—two blankets and a handkerchief.
The Indians readily accepted the offering, but still demanded that
Ecuyer vacate the stockade. They had no inkling that the blankets and
kerchief were more deadly than a platoon of English sharpshooters.
Ecuyer had ordered the presents deliberately infected with smallpox
spores at the post hospital. By mid July, the Delawares were dying as
though they had been raked by a grape cannonade. Fort Pitt remained
firmly in English hands. [with footnote to Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb
E. Washburn, Indian Wars (New York: American Heritage, 1977; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)]
The same year, British General Sir Jeffrey Amherst urged Colonel Henry
Bouquet to figure some way of infecting France's Indian allies with
smallpox. On July 13, the colonel wrote that he would attempt seeding
some blankets with Variola, then send them to the warring
tribes. Recognizing the risk of such a tactic, Bouquet expressed the
hope that he would not catch the sickness himself. Whether the plan was
ever carried out is unknown. [p. 124; with footnote to John Duffy,
"Smallpox and the Indians in the American Colonies," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 25 (1951): 324-341]
F. Mark Wheelis, "Biological warfare before 1914," in E. Geissler and J. Moon,
Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 8-34:
[Historical events and records] suggest that the use of smallpox as a
weapon may have been widely entertained by British military commanders,
and may have been employed without scruple when opportunity offered,
possibly on a number of occasions. [p. 29]
Other Links
-
"Amherst, Anthrax And Remembering The Past", by Jordan Dill
-
"Plains Indian Smallpox Genocide", by O. N. Eddins
-
"If you knew the conditions…": Health Care to Native Americans, an exhibit at the National Library of Medicine
-
Smallpox information from MedHist, the UK's gateway to resources for the history of medicine
- The Sunshine Project an international non-profit organization working against the hostile use of biotechnology
-
Smallpox: the Weapon, an article by Dan Eden
-
1st SPOT Bioterrorism, information about various diseases and bioterror
-
History of Biowarfare NOVA Online (Public Broadcasting System)
-
Center for Biosecurity,
an independent, non-profit organization of the University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center, with its base of operations located in Baltimore,
Maryland.
-
The Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, provides training and education for control and prevention of bioterrorism and infectious disease.
-
Smallpox books and other materials from Geometry Online Learning Center
Author of this site is
Peter d'Errico ©
Copyright permission for educational use only, with credit to author and URL
This site is a mirror of
http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/amherst/lord_jeff.html at the
University of Massachusetts/Amherst, Department of Legal Studies
There aren't any mementoes to Lord Jeffrey Amherst
at Amherst town hall.
